Sienna ran.
Her lungs burned. Her heels hit the pavement hard with every step, and the wedding dress kept fighting her, tulle wrapping around her knees like it had picked a side and it wasn’t hers. She yanked it up higher and kept moving.
She looked left. Right. Up and down the street, it was empty.
The kind of empty that felt personal. Like the city had decided to sit this one out.
Come on. She needed one person. One face. Someone she could grab by the arm and say Help me, please, just help me. Then she heard them.
Footsteps more than one set. The particular rhythm of men who are not running because they’re panicking but because they’ve been told to, which is somehow worse.
She spun around.
Three of them. Black jackets. Moving fast, spreading out across the street in a formation that said they’d done this before and expected it to take about thirty more seconds.
Sienna turned back.
And there, turning onto the street from the far end, yellow and battered and entirely miraculous, was a taxi.
She stepped directly into its path.
The cab lurched to a stop. The driver’s window came down. He took in the wedding dress, the veil hanging half off her head, the wild eyes and the heels and the general impression of a woman who had experienced a significant morning.
"Runaway bride?" he said.
"Drive."
She yanked the door open, gathered approximately forty pounds of tulle, and threw herself inside.
"Drive, drive, drive,"
The driver drove.
For about half a block, he seemed to think this was a normal fare. A bit dramatic, maybe. Unusual dress choice for a Tuesday afternoon. But normal.
Then he checked his mirror.
Three men in black were running after them. Not flagging them down. Not stopping. Chasing.
His eyes moved to the mirror. To Sienna. Back to the mirror.
"Step on the gas," Sienna said. "Please."
He stepped on the gas.
"Nearest police station," she said, leaning forward. "I need to report a crime."
Even as she said it, a small cold voice in the back of her head said Really, Sienna? The police? But she pushed it down. She had no phone. No money. No plan. The police were a plan.
The driver glanced at her in the mirror again. Then at the street behind them. His eyes had narrowed, doing math of a very specific and unhappy kind.
"Those men," he said slowly. "Back there."
"Yes."
"They look like..." He paused. Turned onto the main road. The city opened up around them, other cars, other people, the ordinary afternoon of people who were not in wedding dresses being chased. "They look like Kessler men."
The name landed in the cab like a stone in still water.
Sienna went very still.
"Yes," she said carefully. "They are."
The driver’s hands tightened on the wheel.
"You want to report someone from the Kessler clan." He said it the way you’d say you want to jump off that building. Pure, sincere disbelief. "To the police."
Sienna nodded.
She had considered telling him the full truth, that it wasn’t just someone from the Kessler clan, it was the man himself, the king of the whole operation, the reason those men existed at all, but she looked at the driver’s face in the mirror and decided that information would not help either of them right now.
The cab slowed.
"I understand," the man said, and his voice had gone quiet in a way that meant the conversation was almost over.
"I can see you are in trouble. Real trouble." He met her eyes in the mirror and she could see that he meant it, that there was genuine sorry in there, genuine human sorry, the kind that knows it isn’t enough.
"But I cannot be part of this. They will kill you." A pause. "They will kill me. My family. Everyone connected to this cab."
"I..."
"I am sorry." And he was. She could hear it. "Please. Get out."
Sienna looked at him for a long moment.
She thought about arguing. She thought about begging. She thought about explaining that she was just a simple librarian and had somehow ended up here, in a stolen wedding dress, in the back of a stranger’s cab, asking him to do something that might genuinely get his family killed.
She couldn’t do it. She opened the door and got out. Mid-afternoon in West Philadelphia. People were staring.
Of course they were staring. She was standing on a public street in a full bridal gown with a veil that had given up entirely and was now functioning more as a scarf, one heel slightly lower than the other because something had happened to it in the alley, tulle everywhere.
She started walking.
Think. She needed to think. No phone, no money, no ID, no shoes that made any sense.
Simon.
The thought arrived like a light coming on in a dark room.
Simon. His apartment was, she did the geography in her head, mapped the streets she knew, counted the blocks, twenty minutes on foot. Maybe fifteen if she moved.
Her heart did something embarrassing at the thought of his face. His actual, familiar, safe face.
She could already hear his voice, the way he’d say her name when he opened the door, the way his eyebrows would climb toward his hairline when he saw the dress, and then she’d be talking, telling him everything, all of it pouring out of her in one long unstoppable flood, and he’d listen, and then he’d say okay, okay, we’re going, let’s go, right now,
She gathered the dress. She started walking faster.
Twenty minutes. She just had to get through twenty minutes without Viktor’s men finding her, without anyone stopping her, without the dress killing her first.
She could do twenty minutes. She’d survived the last eighteen hours. She could do twenty minutes.
When Sienna arrived, the sounds drifted through the thin walls of Simon’s apartment door, unmistakable, horrible, the kind of sounds that your brain tries to explain away for exactly one second before it stops being kind to you. She heard them before she saw them.
Sienna’s hand was raised to knock. She didn’t knock. She pushed the door open.
The room rearranged itself in front of her eyes in pieces.
Simon’s apartment. The familiar mess of it, the sneakers by the door, the stack of textbooks on the table, the lamp she’d helped him pick out from the second-hand store on Grover Street. All of it exactly as she remembered.
And Simon. Her Simon. Bent over the couch. His hands gripping a woman’s thighs. Moving. Not stopping. Not noticing.
One tear dropped from Sienna’s eye before she could catch it. Just one. It fell, and she didn’t move, and she stood in the doorway in a wedding dress that belonged to a monster and watched the boy she had loved for two years destroy everything quietly and thoroughly without even knowing she was there.
She had been missing since yesterday. Not looking. Not calling anyone. Not sick with worry. Here. She stepped back. Her heel caught the doorframe. The small sound was enough.